ERIC JOHNSON: It's almost Halloween, so here's a spooky story. It takes place on the USS Hornet, an American aircraft carrier that was built during World War II. The story starts on the fantail, in the back of the carrier. It's a quiet night and four soldiers are out there, getting some fresh air.

LAURA FIES: It was the evening, they were just relaxing, they're done with their training. And then one of them just stands up and silently goes back inside. And his three friends follow him and they watch as he goes downstairs, down one hatch and they follow him. And the passageways are dark. It's not lit. There's no reason that the lights would be on. And they finally find him in front of sickbay and he is sitting on the bench, the waiting area, and he's crying. So one of them gets up the nerve to go and sit down beside him and goes like, "Hey buddy, what's up?" And apparently he comes back to himself and he does not remember how he got down there. This man just blind-walked down to sickbay and took a seat.

ERIC: Was he just stressed or was he possessed? This is just one of many, many ghost stories associated with the USS Hornet. Sailors and pilots who walk through walls, smells and sounds that can't be explained, tables and lockers that seem to move on their own.

LAURA: Hornet's nickname is The Grey Ghost, so that already evokes a certain cryptic-ness to it. People started telling stories from day one when they started chipping paint after it being 30 years abandoned.

ERIC: That's Laura Fies, the executive director of the USS Hornet Museum. Or, if you prefer its full name...

LAURA: The USS Hornet Sea, Air, and Space Museum because we touch sea, air, and space in our history and what we teach.

ERIC: Most of the year, Laura's job is to talk about the Hornet's deployments during World War II or the vital role it played in the Apollo 11 and 12 missions. But every Halloween or whenever a ghost-hunting TV show comes calling, everything gets a little spookier.

LAURA: The joke on the ship is the ghosts are good, the ship wants to kill you.

ERIC: This is Call 'Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums work and why we love them. I'm Eric Johnson. Today on the podcast, do ghost stories belong at a history museum? How do you maintain an aircraft carrier without federal funding? And how much flour do you need if you want to make 7,000 donuts? We'll talk about all of that and more with Laura Fies from the USS Hornet, right after this.

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ERIC: What does the word "museum" mean to you? What do museums just mean to you generally?

LAURA: It's hard to define, and that's kind of by intention. It's kind of like the word "art." It's like, what is art? If you have to ask, it's already art. That's the thing. I went to graduate school and we did have this conversation. What is a museum? Can we judge what's a museum? If the Ice Cream Museum calls that a museum, can they not be a museum? Does it take artifact collection? Not necessarily. Does it take things? Physical, tangible things? Not really. You could have a museum of ideas. So it's really kind of a third place where people can gather, have conversations, look inside themselves, learn more about the world. It's a very broad term. Zoos, aquariums? Also museums. All kinds of museums exist in this world.

ERIC: That's so interesting. When I was starting this podcast, I was thinking, should I be talking to zoos and aquariums as well? And I was like, maybe season two. And what's your first memory of going to a museum?

LAURA: My parents took my sister and I to a lot of museums, so I'm not sure if I could choose a first memory. We grew up in Santa Rosa, but we definitely came down to the San Francisco area a lot. So I have childhood memories of the Exploratorium, I think the Bay Area Discovery Museum on the north side of the Golden Gate Bridge. That's a kids' museum, so I think we were wee little when we went to that one. And some of the more local ones, there's half a dozen in Santa Rosa alone that I'm sure we got pulled into.

ERIC: Was the Charles Schulz Museum open when you were kids?

LAURA: It was not. I actually did some volunteer work there as a 18-, 19-year-old, but it was not there when we were kids. We would've definitely gone.

ERIC: So a lot of the museums that I am profiling on the podcast, they are on the smaller side. They're focused on very specific topics like one person or one general idea like the history of pinball. But your museum is huge, both physically and also in the scope of the stories that you are trying to tell. I was wondering if you could first lay out for folks who haven't been, it's what, 900 feet long, something like that?

LAURA: Just under, yeah. So I very much consider ourselves, I describe it as a midsize museum in a big museum body.

ERIC: Yes.

LAURA: Because we have 23 full-time-equivalent staff, which puts us solidly in the middle. There's many more museums in the world with only one staff or no staff and all volunteers versus the ones you'd probably think of that have 300, 400 staff members in it. We have 23 full-time equivalents, and yes, the building though, the facility, the ship — which is our primary artifact and houses the entire museum — is just under 900 feet long. It's like 894 feet. If you put us on our end, we would actually be slightly taller than the Transamerica building on the San Francisco skyline.

ERIC: And also just even getting into the museum is unusual. Could you describe for people ... We don't have time to mind palace our way through the whole aircraft carrier.

LAURA: I'm good for it. I'm good for it.

ERIC: I know you could. I believe you could, but just could you describe the experience for a visitor of entering the museum and then what do people see and hear when they first come in?

LAURA: Sure. So to kind of start the intro of this discussion, museum ship is a niche museum field. That said, there are over 300 museum ships in the United States, but in my mind, I put it in the historic house/historic fort territory. What makes them so special is that they are how they were when they were in use. So that starts with entry. In many museum ships' case, and including ours, you board the ship using the gangway, the original ship's gangways. And it's a stairs and then you go up a ramp — a fairly steep ramp — and you get onto the ship and you board it the same way. We actually have our guest entrance where the officers would've come on board, the quarterdeck, and that's where our admissions desk is. And then you're introduced to a big cavernous hangar deck, which would've been essentially the parking garage for our planes.

ERIC: And when you get in there, could you explain for folks as they look left and right, what are they seeing in that hangar deck?

LAURA: Our collection includes about 15 historic aircraft and the majority of them are in the hangar deck because outside is rougher on them so we try to keep as many indoors as possible. So when you come in, first of all, you'll see the ship's bell, big brass bell, and that's the original ship's bell. They all had them. It's very loud when it rings. We try to not let people do it all the time. It would be noisy. But once you pay admission, we actually lead you right past one of our bomb elevators where we have a nuclear shape, which would've been in Hornet's collection when she was operational. If you looked above the bomb elevator, we have our scoreboard during World War II. Hornet served in 59 active combat missions in the Pacific theater and shot down 1,400 enemy aircraft. And we had a literal scoreboard, and the one we have on display is a replica, but it's accurate.

ERIC: So the scoreboard is ... They would've been updating that during the war as they took down more enemy ships.

LAURA: The lads would've had it painted on a wall and they would've been ... It's somewhere between a morale boost and just literally keeping count. And then you have our safety orientation. So we make sure to give you a little — not you when you visited because you got the straightaway, but most people — most people get the little safety intro because we are both a national and state historic landmark and we actually cannot change the way the ship is built. We can't put normal stairs in. We have ladders, which are called ladders because they're such steep stairs. So we warn people about that. We say, "Hey, watch your hands, feet. Just be careful." And generally people are. And then we say, "If you hear this claxon sound, that's our emergency alarm, head up," and things like that. But also introduce people to the concept of we have extra tours.

So you are free to self-explore a lot of the space, three of our main decks. But if you want to go up to the captain's bridge or down to the engine room, we have that tour available. One of our docents can lead you down because it's a little harder to get to.

ERIC: Right. And as I recall, so the scoreboard is to the right as you enter and then to the left, that's where you have some of your space-related exhibits. You have, was it the training capsule for recovering the astronauts from Apollo 11 and Apollo 12? And is that also where the Airstream, the quarantine Airstream, is, right?

LAURA: Yeah. We placed our space exhibit where it is because that was the historic location where the mobile quarantine facility was placed by NASA. So NASA had Airstream build six trailers for the Apollo mission. We have one of the six in our collection. They were essentially airtight because they were worried about moon germs. They genuinely didn't know and you don't want to destroy the world with pathogens from the moon, of course, best to be avoided.

ERIC: And also President Nixon was going to be on the aircraft carrier when astronauts returned.

LAURA: He was, he was.

ERIC: So they were just like, we don't want to get the president sick with a moon virus.

LAURA: It's a bad look. That's why the trailer is [there], and then we kind of built the rest of the exhibit around it. So we do have AS202, that's the lunar module. That one of course is representative of the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 capsules that Hornet plucked out of the water, but it's also, we have a personal relationship with it. We actually picked up that very one during training. That is actually on loan to us from the Smithsonian and we take good care of it and are thrilled to have it. And then next to that we have a Sea King helicopter, and it's representative of the one that would've picked up the actual Apollo capsules. The one that did sunk during training, so it's no longer available to us, but it is the same type of helicopter. We painted it to look like Helicopter 66 that did do the picking up.

And it is also positioned as best we can based on photos of where it would've been when the astronauts were let off of it and then straight into the back of the mobile quarantine facility.

ERIC: Right. And is that where you have the footprints painted? Yes? Explain the footprints.

LAURA: So we have white footprints painted on the deck, and the little claim to fame, the little label on them is "astronauts' first steps back on Earth."

ERIC: When we took our tour, I was like, "Is this really on 'earth'?" I mean, they're on the ship, but I think it counts. I think it counts.

LAURA: Is metal not a form of earth? Steel, dirt, same thing.

ERIC: Touché. You got me there. One thing I really was impressed by when you gave me a tour of the Hornet was we went, I guess you would call it below decks, right? We went below decks and I was really impressed by the way the museum evokes the feeling of being a service member, of what it's like to live and to work when you're deployed for, what was it, 15 months at a time?

LAURA: World War II, I believe, it was 16 months straight without touching port. They were busy.

ERIC: Yeah. So could you talk about how you thought about designing the exhibits down there in order to evoke these feelings and in order to most effectively tell that story?

LAURA: Sure. So it is something we're always considering. We definitely want to give people the feeling that they are there while the sailors are there. That's what we really want to get toward and get to. And to do that, we have to show the space as it was. In the same vein, it's a very large space. So we do break up what we call the restored spaces that we try to outfit with all the supplies and all the items that they would've had back when they were in use and show it as it was. We do have a few museum-style galleries and it does break up the space. There's something called museum fatigue, which is real, and Hornet evokes it very quickly because it's a lot of sea foam green and a lot of cream walls and doors on the ceiling. So to kind of break up the built monotony, we introduce just concepts of history, background.

So we talk about, let's talk about women in the military. Let's talk about Bay Area at war during World War II. Let's explain some of the background of why Hornet's here, what it was doing during its service between 1943 and 1970, because this is also information that people probably or might not or might come in with knowledge of. And if they don't, that's fine. We're here to introduce them to it.

ERIC: Yeah. Well, I think at least in my experience, when I learned about the wars that America had been involved in, when I generally learned military history, I think a lot of it focuses on battles and generals and ships and vehicles and things like that. I think there's relatively little, at least in the kind of casual, popular discourse, relatively little discussion of just the day-to-day experience of serving on a ship like this. And that includes things like the fact that there's a bakery and there's little shops and there's all these minutiae which really brought history alive, I think, in the way you presented it.

LAURA: Yeah. To me, history is about people, and people have been people for tens of thousands of years. And certainly that was true for even World War II. And it was... I say "fellas" because it was 100% men who served on the ship, but if you did the math of 59 combat missions over 16 months, it wasn't exactly this balance, but that's like one battle every two weeks. And in the meantime, you're stressed, you're bored, you're bored and stressed at the same time. Your bosses are trying to keep you busy and entertained. So yeah, we did have hobby shops that included model kits and paint by number, and we had a library and sports clubs and bands. So it really was a city at sea. And I think that by telling that story, people when they come on board, no matter how old they are, what their background is, they can envision themselves in this situation because we're talking about what they ate, what they did during their day, what their actual work entailed.

And you're like, oh, I could see myself in this situation. Maybe it's not always pleasant or I couldn't do this, but you could see yourself in it. And having that tangibility, I think, is how people learn all the better.

ERIC: Just imagining myself in that situation, I would get lost every single day in that ship.

LAURA: It's interesting actually. I've talked to people who served on Hornet itself, but also other people, they didn't explore much. So they knew where they worked, where they slept, and where they ate, and they were not encouraged to really go other places. I mean, there were some leisure spaces that they could go into, but you can see so much more as a Hornet Museum visitor than probably the sailors were able to just because you would have the freedom of movement to do so.

ERIC: So before I came in for this, I was looking up other podcasts that have mentioned the USS Hornet. And there was a great one from the Air and Space Museum, there were a couple World War II history podcasts, but almost every single one that I found was about ghosts. We've got to talk about this. I think maybe there's not room in your longer museum title to also include and ghosts.

LAURA: And haunted.

ERIC: And haunted. Some people call it the most haunted ship in America.

LAURA: I'll accept it. Yeah, yeah.

ERIC: You'll take that?

LAURA: I'll take that.

ERIC: Could you explain how did this start? How did the Hornet acquire a reputation for being haunted?

LAURA: Oh gosh. I mean, what ship doesn't have its ghost stories, but Hornet's nickname is The Gray Ghost, so that already evokes a certain little crypticness to it. People started telling stories from day one when they started chipping paint after being 30 years abandoned in Bremerton, Washington.

ERIC: This was one of my questions. So they weren't telling the ghost stories when they were on the ship. This was after the ship was decommissioned. It was sitting kind of abandoned for many decades, and then the ghost stories came out later then.

LAURA: I have heard stories from both eras, to be fair. But the ones, of course, that would've been left over from the operational days are few and far between because we don't have that many sailors to retell those tales.

That said, Hornet was actually fantastically lucky during World War II, and that was the main active combat situation it was in. Over 200 people died, I believe. Many of those pilots, many of those just accidents happening on ship because it's a very dangerous place to work. But in terms of battle damage, Hornet did not receive much. So, I mean, 200 ghosts is probably more than enough. You don't need more than that. But yeah, we have stories of ... A lot of stories came out of the restoration period when they were building it back up to be habitable again. We collected some, actually, when I was working in the overnight program, we hosted a group of U.S. Army reservists and they stayed for actually two weeks. It was a training thing. And oh gosh, they came to me every morning with some stories and I'm like, "I'm just collecting them." I'm just like, "Here we go."

ERIC: What sort of stories? You got to give us a taste of this.

LAURA: Okay. So the most impressive one, I'll just give you the best one that I got from that. So we have a place on the main deck level called the fantail. Imagine just a back porch, if you will, looking at the San Francisco skyline, it's exterior. And there were four Army guys, soldiers, hanging out there. It was evening, there was relaxing, they're done with their training. And then one of them just stands up and silently goes back inside and his three friends follow him and they watch as he goes downstairs, down one hatch, and they follow him and the passageways are dark. It's not lit. There's no reason that the lights would be on, but he's walking just through the dark, in the dark. It's cave dark down there, by the way. There's no windows. And they finally find him in front of the sick bay and he is sitting on the bench, the waiting area, and he's crying.

So one of them gets up the nerve to go and sit down beside him and goes like, "Hey buddy, what's up?" And apparently he comes back to himself and he does not remember how he got down there. So perhaps a case of mild possession, who knows? But this man just blind walked down to sick bay and took a seat. So there's one story for you.

ERIC: Yeah. So you've had a lot of TV shows that have come in and they've filmed on the Hornet, right?

LAURA: Right.

ERIC: And as we said, podcasts that have come in and have examined its spookiness. But I'm wondering, how do you as the museum, how do you engage with this reputation? Do you welcome this sort of attention?

LAURA: We do. I personally, I kind of enjoy the camp of it, I've got to admit, I think ghost stories are fun. I consider ghost stories the clickbait of history.

ERIC: (laugh)

LAURA: They're going to learn history. We will teach them history during this ghost story. We'll inject it somehow and they'll walk away knowing something more. And if we have to wrap it into a ghost story, so be it. A little bit of dark spooks and you're going to learn about the typhoon in 1945, gosh darn it.

ERIC: That's a great way of thinking about it. I never thought of it this way, is that if you are interested in supernatural stories, things like this, it's just kind of a backdoor to history.

LAURA: It's a gateway drug. We'll teach you. You're going to learn.

ERIC: You are talking about stuff that may or may not have happened in the past.

LAURA: Exactly. It always involves a past, whether it's a medieval king or, in this case, World War II sailors.

ERIC: So are the reputed ghosts of the Hornet, are they supposed to be service members or —

LAURA: Predominantly, yeah. And they're supposed to be ... The joke on the ship is: The ghosts are good, the ship wants to kill you.

ERIC: (laugh) The ghosts are good, the ship wants to kill you.

LAURA: Yes. Yes.

ERIC: And you regularly host tours where people can stay overnight in the ship that wants to kill you.

LAURA: Yeah, yeah. No, that's why we do the safety video.

ERIC: (laugh)

LAURA: Got to teach everyone her tricks so they can watch out for them. Many of our visitors, we have about 15,000 students come through our doors every year. Not all of them are overnight kiddos, but our Live-Aboard Overnight Program is one of the quintessential programs of our education, and it's great. They get to live ... Experience a night like a sailor. So we have 700 beds available at any one time, which is but a mere fraction of the 3,500 that would've been there originally, but we maintain 700 of them. We do not have 700 kids at once, but that's just how many beds we got. So we have them come aboard. It's like 5 or 6 PM. We serve them dinner down in the enlisted mess. They ate where the crew ate. We give them a nice two- or three-hour tour of key locations on the ship.

They see the ship's wheel, captain's bridge, engine spaces, catapult rooms. We teach them about STEM, we teach them about history, and then we sometimes tell them little ghost stories, which keeps them in bed.

ERIC: (laugh)

LAURA: And then they wake up and then we give them breakfast and out you go. Thanks for playing. But we also have History Mystery, that's our spooky tours, and that could be either just evening or overnight flavored. So you could pick your poison on that one. You'll hear ghost stories either way for that one.

ERIC: Exactly. You've mentioned a couple of different groups there. Can you talk about the type of visitors that come to the Hornet? Who typically is there? And also if you could speak to the folks who have worked on the ship in terms of volunteering and docents and all the people who you would find on the Hornet.

LAURA: Yeah. So the main bread-and-butter demographic is probably what people would expect — your older male really into World War II — but we also have a lot of families and I think it's just because it's a fun place to be and spend time. And so our education program specifically, we do K through 12 education, but fourth grade is the center point of our education programming. So you'll see a lot of 10-year-olds running around. A lot of young families. Our membership levels include specific ones geared towards if you have two kids, if you have four grown adults in your family, we try to be very inclusive of welcoming all family units that one can envision. We do have a lot of programs that we intentionally build to try to attract younger audiences. So whether that's our convention — our Comic-Con-style convention — or our Halloween party, we have a New Year's Eve swing dance that honestly pulls from all demographics.

And then our volunteer groups, we have six–seven different volunteer divisions, and there's a lot of high schoolers who are into aircraft restoration, I'll say that much. We have one aircraft up on our flight deck right now that was done entirely (with adult supervision) by a high school group. That was actually a really cool opportunity to see them at work. It was one of the Veterans Day [events]. We had Admiral Dwyer, who was an unretired admiral at the time, since retired, but he came to the ship and he spent some time with them on that aircraft.

ERIC: With the group of high schoolers?

LAURA: With the group of high schoolers and climbed up there with them and they were just so excited and he was such a gem, just kind of letting them tell him all that they did and pointing to things in the cockpit and on the wings. That was just a great opportunity, and where else can you get that?

ERIC: How much of the work on the Hornet is maintenance and things like that, or related to restoring aircraft? I assume that a lot of the large machinery you have on the ship must require a lot of attention.

LAURA: You might've heard boats are expensive.

ERIC: Yes.

LAURA: Hornet's an aircraft carrier, so pretty much everything we have goes into maintaining the old girl. She's sturdy, though, but she needs a lot of love. She currently needs a paint job, but she's big. But we take care of it as well as we can. We do have almost about 300 volunteers. They outnumber us 10 to one, which is awesome because they do so much good work for us, volunteering their time to do so. But if anyone here, everyone listening, ever wants to zen out to chipping some paint, we have a job for you, just saying. It's a never-ending task. It's Sisyphean. You could start on one end ... It's the Golden Gate Bridge but without the Golden Gate Bridge paint bucket money.

ERIC: (laugh) Exactly.

LAURA: There's always something to do. But one of the things we are so proud about is that we do have such a strong working collection. Every piece of Hornet that we can keep using, we do. Not only does using it help keep it kind of moving, the parts moving, but as a museum, we generally use it. Two of our three aircraft elevators still work, which is how we get planes and equipment from the hangar deck up to the flight deck. We have bomb elevators that work, dumbwaiters that work. We have winches, cranes, our boat and aircraft crane that's hanging off the side of the ship. That was the one that picked up the Apollo capsules. We still use it today.

ERIC: Wow.

LAURA: And it's World War II tech. As long as you can keep up with the upkeep, it keeps working.

ERIC: Yeah. Something that I'm really curious about is just sort of for a museum that is ... You compared the Hornet to a historic house, and for a historic house, they may want to keep things as they were. They'd not really repair something that breaks because that would ruin some of the historic character. But for your situation, you have moving parts that need to be maintained for just operations around the ship.

LAURA: Yeah. I mean, sometimes you do encounter the whole philosophical ship of Theseus, right?

ERIC: Exactly. Yes.

LAURA: The flight deck will need to be restored, fully restored, eventually. In a perfect world, we would use the original techniques and the teak wood and it's 900 feet of teak wood, and that's just currently out of our budget. So other museum ships have had other solutions for their flight deck. There's five aircraft carrier museums in the United States and we're one of them.

ERIC: Yeah. So this one's ... The Yorktown is the sister ship to the Hornet?

LAURA: There's four Essex-class carriers, of which we are one. So it's Hornet in the Bay Area. There's the Lexington in Corpus Christi, Texas. There is the Yorktown in the Carolinas, and then there is Intrepid in New York. And then the final aircraft carrier museum is the Midway down in San Diego, but that's slightly younger and bigger. We try to be as respectful of the repairs and maintenance as we can be, and generally doing it like they would have done it is the best way anyway. But sometimes we do have to put in modern solutions. Not as many as one might expect. For example, when we need to do some plumbing work, we'll often try to find bathrooms — heads — that we don't use and we'll self-cannibalize and that'll be probably a problem down the line. But currently, the head on the fifth deck is not being used and probably won't for another decade.

ERIC: Right. Might as well.

LAURA: Might as well.

ERIC: You told me that the Hornet has been moored in Alameda since, what, the mid to late '90s. Do I have that right?

LAURA: It came into Pier 3 at 1995. Yeah.

ERIC: '95. If you wanted to sail the ship or move the ship, could it still leave the port?

LAURA: So the Navy lets us have a little less fun and the ship doesn't actually sail under her own power, but she is floating.

ERIC: Okay.

LAURA: So when we move, it would be a dead ship tow, which is when we just [use] tug boats. So we can be tugged wherever we want, but the answer is yes but no, no but yes. It would not be like a ship sailing forth, which is probably for the best anyway. Hornet ran on bunker fuel — well, we were a steam-powered turbine engine, steam made from bunker fuel — and our mileage was a gallon a foot. That's not great.

ERIC: (laugh) Yeah, a gallon a foot. Oh my gosh. Would you ever want to move the ship? Would you ever want to relocate beyond Alameda?

LAURA: We are always exploring options. We would love to stay in Alameda, but it's a small location. We don't receive that much foot traffic, and the Hornet has ongoing deferred maintenance. So at some point we're going to ... I mean, we have actually, we've been really lucky actually bucking the trends that museums are seeing still post-Covid. We have exceeded slightly our pre-Covid attendance numbers.

ERIC: Fantastic.

LAURA: So yeah, which is awesome. We're trying to figure out what we did so good, but we're running with it. We're not complaining. It's not eventually going to keep up with something that's going to fall apart. So if we had an option where we could get ourselves better situated for better long-term sustainability, we're going to be seriously looking at that option.

ERIC: Well, I will say though, for your current location, the way to get there, I think you and I would agree the best way to get there would be to take the ferry.

LAURA: Oh yes. That's how I got here today. So it works both ways. But yeah, it's a commuter ferry, Seaplane Lagoon. So if anyone here wants to come to the Hornet on a Monday or a Friday, the Seaplane Ferry is amazing.

ERIC: And it drops you off just like 10 minutes walk maybe from the museum?

LAURA: It's like it was built for us. It's a 10-minute walk away from the museum.

ERIC: That's a very nice perk. Yeah. Best way to get to a museum.

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Do you have a museum story? Maybe there was a time you got lost, a time that you were moved to tears, or a time you saw something that blew your mind. No matter what your story is, I want to hear it. Head to likemuseum.com and click submit a museum story. It might end up on a future episode. That's likemuseum.com and click submit a museum story.

I want to ask about your personal story with the museum. How did you come to work there?

LAURA: I had an undergraduate degree from UC Davis and I got in in art history. And I was actually spoken to by an adviser and he said, "Do you want to go into museums or art galleries?" And I said, "Well, I'm not really a fan of modern art, so I'd much prefer museums." And he says, "Okay, a master's degree might help with that." So I'm looking around at all the master's programs for museum studies — that is a master's program, museum studies — and there are two in the Bay Area that have it, and SF State is one of them. That's the one I'd ultimately go to, but it requires 60 hours of museum volunteering before you even apply. That's part of the application process. Fair. It lets people understand what they're getting into with the nonprofit life and museums in general. So go experience it and then we'll teach you.

So I did some volunteer work at the Schulz Museum. That was summer, so I was living back home with my folks in Santa Rosa. I also got some volunteer experience at the Walt Disney Museum.

ERIC: They're also going to be on this podcast, so small world.

LAURA: They probably wouldn't remember me, but I was one of their gallery guides, I had a great time. I was actually volunteering with the Schulz Museum, and it was an anniversary of the Apollo missions. Snoopy was — this is a long-winded way of coming back, I'll come back to it, though, I promise — Snoopy was a mascot of the NASA Apollo program as a safety icon.

ERIC: Love that.

LAURA: Little silver Snoopy. So Schulz Museum showed up to the Hornet Museum, which is how I first touched it. And I said, "This is pretty cool." In my undergraduate studies of art history, it also included a lot of architecture. I actually did a study abroad for history of medieval warfare in Scotland. So I'm like, "This is kind of like a fortress." I'm like, "I could be interested. I don't know anything about World War II, but we can get there." And I started volunteering. Knowing I needed more hours for my grad program, I started volunteering there as a docent tour guide. And I learned everything from these old fellows, oral history-wise. I mean, they had some written stuff, but I was mostly just toddling on behind them learning tours, and that was 15 years ago. So they actually got me my first job. I'm pretty sure the guys I worked with bragged about me enough or forced them to hire me as a part-time collections manager for artifact care.

So thank you, Monday docent crew. And then I just kind of hopped around jobs until I got to my current position of executive director. Stick around long enough, I suppose, and it can happen.

ERIC: And the stuff you were learning at the time — around 2011 then — I assume by this point, the docents weren't people who had served in World War II. Or were they?

LAURA: We had a few from World War II still.

ERIC: Really?

LAURA: Yes. Just recently, just this year, we had someone from Korea finally retire at the tender age of 94, 95. Dale decided — his name was Dale, he flew Panthers in Korea — and he decided maybe he didn't have to ... It was a little bit of work to climb onto an aircraft carrier every day. We said, "Okay, Dale, that's great. We'll throw a party for you. Thank you so much for your service." But yeah, we did have some World War II. Of course, most of them have passed on at this point just by age, raw age, doing the math, but we have a few who served in Korea still. We have many who served, several who served in Vietnam. And of course, the Hornet was decommissioned in 1970. So the youngest docent we could have that would've served on the Hornet would have been 18 in 1970. So: math.

ERIC: Do the math there. Yeah. What do you wish that you had known before you became the executive director of the Hornet? Before you assumed this position of leadership, you graduated from working at the ship to then having to manage all of this. What do you wish you had known back then?

LAURA: I think I was fairly lucky in that before I got this title, I was actually directly under the previous executive director, so I saw a lot of stuff that was behind the curtain. I'm not sure if I would've given previous me any specific advice. I mean, it is interesting because you're working around people who have such content expertise. And I'm not sure this has evolved since I have been executive director, but you definitely have to acknowledge the knowledge in the room. I feel like I've always tried to be really good about that because I come from an art history background, I come from a museum background. I know nothing. I have plane blindness. I'm like, don't ask me. I know most of our planes, but don't pop quiz me.

ERIC: Generally. Some other ship's planes, uh-uh.

LAURA: Exactly. A battleship? No, no, no, no. I know Hornet vaguely during World War II, but that's awesome. I love having people who know more than I do. And I think I've come to try to get a lot better at delegating that kind of work and being like, no, you're the expert. I'll let you shine. You come and talk. I can keep people entertained for an hour, maybe two hours, flex those docent muscles again. But if someone wants an every knob and dial tour, which some people do, I'm like, oh, that's not me, friend. Let me introduce you to someone who actually served in that engine room. Then you can go disappear for four hours.

ERIC: Yeah. Could you also talk about how the Hornet operates financially? Where does its money come from and how do you deploy that money?

LAURA: One thing that people don't expect is that we are not federally funded. We actually don't receive federal or Navy funding. The Navy effectively gave a nonprofit an aircraft carrier and said, "Have fun." So we get our funding from the way most other museums do, which is admissions, membership, donations. When people choose to use Hornet as an event venue, that's also revenue that comes to us. And we do get grants. We had a grant last year, extraordinary one from Hearst Foundation for our education programming, and that was very lovely. We do depend on local and people and tourists coming in and stopping by and buying things from our store. So we always do really encourage that. And I think people expect that ... They see the ship and, as I interpret it, they probably think it's some kind of monolith, some well-funded solid thing.

ERIC: I mean, it looks visually —

LAURA: We are very visually imposing.

ERIC: Yes.

LAURA: But inside, again, it's that midsize museum. It's just making the paydays as they come down and doing our best to hang in there. We're hanging in there pretty good, we're very scrappy, but everything helps.

ERIC: Do you have a dream or a goal for what you want the museum to be in the future? Something you have not been able to do yet with it?

LAURA: Stabilizing it? I mean, we are hanging in there, but Hornet's had to be scrappy for the past 28 years. And I would love us to get beyond scrappy. The staff we work with, the crew we have, if we could just get more visitors one way or another and have a little bit more money to actually do real long-term project planning, that would be amazing. So we're slowly working towards acquiring those resources and meeting people and connecting up with people who can get us those kind of longer-term goals solved and resolved. But it's a great crew that we do have and being able to think ... Having to think creatively on your feet is rough, but having the crew who can do it is awesome. So when we can solve problems, it's like, yes, did it again. But it's stressful in the moment as well.

But at the same time, this is the kind of staff and volunteers when you're working with, it can be like 2:00 AM and you're cleaning up after a party and it's like, okay, you have to like these guys because you're not doing museum work, you're just getting through the night and solving the problem and you're doing museum work. But there's a lot of camaraderie.

ERIC: I bet there's some unusual quirks to having this job that may be different from any other type of museum.

LAURA: A lot of museums have unique quirks, of course, but there are definitely once-a-month times where you just look at each other and be like, "Oh, this is our job. This is what we're working with right now." We open up a hatch or a cabinet door that hasn't been opened in too long and we find some old flares and we're like, "Uh-oh."

ERIC: Those have been there since the '40s.

LAURA: Yeah, uh-oh. But we know who to call. We have our friendly connections with the 95th weapons of mass destruction fellows and we are like, "Hey, hey guys."

ERIC: FYI.

LAURA: I don't think it's a problem, but it might be a problem. So anytime. And then we have opportunities to host. But we have some crazy creative events on the ship. It's always fun to also get the inquiries to be part of that and just be like, "Oh, you want to do what? No, no, we could do it. Just tell me more. Let's go." We've had Jeep obstacle courses on the flight deck. We've had Facebook set up zip lines on the pier. We've had Google made it snow in hangar bay one. We've had filming. Hornet has a filming credit.

ERIC: Yes, I saw it was "The Master," the Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

LAURA: The Master, and the critically acclaimed "XXX: State of the Union."

ERIC: I missed that one. I'll get right on that.

LAURA: I think I caught it once on TV and it happened to be a part that was on Hornet. I'm like, "That's weird." I'm like, "I know that hangar deck."

ERIC: "That's work."

LAURA: But it's also fun because sometimes they leave movie props and that's how we acquire more set dressing. So we're like, "No, no, you can leave the catapult cables. No, that looks good. You did good on that. Please leave it." That's always fun. When the ghost shows come to film, those are always just kind of fun to see them come through walking around in the dark.

ERIC: How does that work for you as a museum operator when you have a ghost show that wants to come through and talk about the ship that wants to kill you? What are your touch points with a TV show like that?

LAURA: We do tell them the spooky stories that we do have and that's the ghost stories. So it's more about the sailors who served. There is a little bit of a push and pull. I mean, no one's trying to push boundaries or anything like that, but I'm like, the sailors aren't evil or spooky or going to get you. They're just living in their afterlife, getting through the day, if you will. But the stories we tell mostly revolve around that. So we tell the story as we want it to be told, and then we let them stumble around in the dark, but also be like, "You need some lights though because it actually gets caved dark downstairs. We don't have windows. It gets solidly dark. Please don't die."

ERIC: What about from visitors? What's the best thing you've ever heard a visitor say?

LAURA: I mean, it depends on the age. Kids [are] just joyful, pointing at everything. You get plane kids, right? You get your dinosaur kids, you have your car kids, you got plane kids, train kids. We get a solid amount of plane kids who just know more than anyone else would. And that's awesome just to hear them rattling off facts. It's really cute when they come dressed up like little astronauts or little "Top Guns."

ERIC: Oh my gosh. I didn't think that'd be a possibility, but of course it is. Of course they do.

LAURA: They wear little space helmets. I'm like, "Oh, you're killing me. So cute." And then you get your veterans who either served on this ship or one like it, and they have very emotional reactions to it. Seeing grown people cry can be a little secondary emotional, I'm like, "Oh, that's heavy for a Monday."

ERIC: Most of them are in fact not possession. Most of them just have real emotions.

LAURA: They just have real remembrance of like, oh, the smell is apparently exactly as it was because it's still there. And it brings them right back to when they were 20s, young 20s, and then stories start pouring out of them and they get to show sometimes when they served on the ship or if they tell us they served on the ship, we will oftentimes take them and their families to where they actually slept and worked. Even if it's not on the beaten path, we'll find it for you. Powers combine, your memory, our knowledge where you probably were. We could find your exact bunk.

ERIC: Wow. One of the stories you were telling me when we were walking around the ship was about keeping morale up among the crew members and how, I think you said any opportunity to bake a cake, they would bake a cake.

LAURA: Yes.

ERIC: Can you talk about the cakes?

LAURA: Cakes. Ship's cakes. So I have had access in my collections manager's day to our storage of newsletters. The ships produced newsletters and newspapers. And gosh, there's a lot of photos of cake. Most of the photos have something to do with cake, and they have some labels on the cakes, as one would. And it's like "10,000th trap" — which is the landing — or "5,000th launch." It was usually based around aircraft movement because we're an aircraft carrier.

But the joke is that any excuse to bake a cake, our bakery popped out a cake, and it could be standard bakery size as one can still order today. But if you wanted to feed all 3,500 men, you had to make what I call a table cake because if you have a banquet table, you just cover that sucker in several layers of cake. It's the size of a table. But you also have photos ... These sailors who are bakers put artistry into their work. And I find that very interesting. We have elements of artistry everywhere, whether it's little mosaic tiles in the deck, paintings on the wall, murals, art. They didn't have to make art, but they did because they're human and they were living in this space. So even the bakers, we have photos of when the Apollo 11 astronauts landed, they had a big old fancy meal and all of the crew was invited and we have the menu from that and we have photos of a small cake, but still good.

And they made spheres on top of it — of cake — of the earth and the moon. And I'm like, that took engineering, that took some effort, but they put it into it. So yes, on display in one of our ready rooms, we currently have a fake, of course, but a representative cake of what they would've been producing in our bakery. During battle stations, individual areas of the ship would be closed down from one another. And especially during World War II, these battles could last hours. The only food to make it across the battle lines were coffee and doughnuts. So if you're a baker, your battle station could be downstairs making doughnuts.

ERIC: Oh wow.

LAURA: Which sounds awesome for the first hour, but I can only imagine if you're, gosh, hour eight into it, it's like, "Coffee and doughnuts, swell. Good. I love this. I love my life right now."

ERIC: Yep. Yep. Wow. I guess you got to keep everyone awake and sugared up if they need to be on their best on their defenses.

LAURA: Exactly. And if you take a sailor's life tour, which is one of our added tours, you can go see the bakery and you could see on the table, we have a recipe for 7,000 doughnuts.

ERIC: In case you ever need it. Yeah.

LAURA: You never know. You never know.

ERIC: What is a small detail about the Hornet that only you appreciate, that the average visitor would never notice but you know it's there because you've been with this museum for so long?

LAURA: I think it'd be the little details. Again, those little living space details, just being able to see ... We still have some sailor graffiti, we call it. If you go on the underside of some of the beds, some of the canvas — because we have canvas racks — some of the undersides still have their writing on it. If you open the right locker, sometimes you'll see writing. Not all of it nice, but some of it fun. But it's just like, oh yeah, people lived here. 3,000 young men lived in this space. This was their home. And just being able to see those little markers of them whittling their days away, I'm like, oh gosh, this is one of those places.

ERIC: When you say 16 months, it's different from actually living 16 months out at sea. Yeah. Since you've been working at the Hornet, where have you looked for inspiration? Have you borrowed any ideas from other places that you've been or things that you've heard?

LAURA: Every museum steals from every other museum.

ERIC: Good!

LAURA: That's good news. Don't let anyone tell you anything different. Everyone always goes to other museums to steal every idea they can. Museum people are the worst visiting other museums. We're looking at how they hung things versus the actual art. It's miserable to be with us on a visit. But I also think that I benefit a lot from coming from the broader museum field. Ship people can be very kind of just like, this is a ship and this is good. Luckily everyone, all of our ship people on our ship appreciate also hearing from other corners of the museum world. But just in terms of immersion, in terms of how we share information, the museum world is always evolving on how to interact with people and best practices, and keeping up with that is important. So we visit big museums, small museums.

I know when I went to London, the Imperial War Museum there, they do amazing interactive work. I've never been to the World War II Museum in New Orleans, but I really want to go because I hear they really deep dive into immersion and set dressing. And luckily we have the set already built out mostly, but how to fill it in, we're always working on that, how to fill it in better and how to engage people's senses because people learn when their senses are engaged. So the more we can do that. So even going to places like Children's Discovery Museum, what do kids like to do? What are they pulling on, pushing on, lifting? How can we use that concept and introduce it to our story? We can usually always make something work if we can see the mechanics behind the concept. The Exploratorium, it's not even cheating, they put out what they call cookbooks.

ERIC: Cookbooks for museum operators?

LAURA: Recipes for interactives. So they call them cookbooks, but they actually publish how their interactives are built. They're a great example and they share it with passion of how they do it. They're kind of a think tank for it. So always going to check in what they're doing.

ERIC: People learn better when the senses are engaged.

LAURA: Yeah.

ERIC: I think you need to start making doughnuts. I think you need to use that 7,000 doughnut recipe.

LAURA: I think we need to do taste. We really discourage them licking the walls, but we can maybe do baked goods.

ERIC: Last question I have for you, and this is the hardest question I have for you in the whole interview, which is if you're in a museum gift shop, what do you buy?

LAURA: I try to exhibit some self-control now.

ERIC: Okay.

LAURA: So honestly, my go-to is looking for things like postcards, something small I can put on my fridge or my wall and do that. But it depends on the museum. Sometimes if they have replicas of artifacts, I'm all over that stuff. Shirts, usually not, but sometimes. I do have a lot of Hornet shirts, but that's because we have good designs and also because you got to represent.

ERIC: Absolutely. Well, Laura, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Wonderful seeing you again and wish you best of luck with everything with the Hornet going forward.

LAURA: Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

ERIC: Thanks again to Laura Fies for coming on the podcast. The USS Hornet Museum is open Friday through Monday in Alameda, California. And there's the haunted house experience, Haunted Hornet. That runs through November 1st and is for ages 13 and up. When I visited the Hornet, they didn't yet have the haunted merch ready, but don't worry, I still got something from the gift shop. It's a hat with the gold "scrambled egg" style leaves on the brim, and it says USS Hornet. This hat is up for grabs in our gift shop giveaway, so if you want to win it, then sign up for our free email newsletter at likemuseum.com. Call 'Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It's produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, LightningPod. Our social media specialist is Julia Wilde. Artwork is by Rhe Civitello. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you at the museum.